A lot of histories of Doctor Who tend to focus on one given story at a time. Brunt’s approach coveys the dizzying chaos of multiple stories being in different stages of development all at once. Seeing things presented in this way sparks a lot of new thoughts and connections.
For example, The Evil of the Daleks was broadcast as the final story of Season 4, the last episode airing on 1 July 1967. After a summer break, Season 5 began with The Tomb of the Cybermen, the first episode broadcast on 2 September. That gap, I think, helped to hide the fact that these two consecutive serials, recorded back to back, have a number of similar features. The Doctor visits the planet of his enemies and meets a larger-headed leader version whose plan is to brainwash humans. The Doctor defeats the villains but, in the closing seconds of the final episode, we see that something survives…
That surely can’t be a coincidence, so I suspect story editor and co-writer Gerry Davis consciously sought to mirror the Dalek story in what he wrote for the Cybermen. Something similar then happened in a subsequent Cybermen story, The Invasion (1968), in which the villains are seen stalking around landmarks of London, mirrors something similar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).
Another connection I’d not made before is that the first approval to wipe an original videotape recording of Doctor Who (boo, hiss) was issued on Thursday 9 March 1967 (p. 198), two days ahead of the broadcast of Episode 1 of The Macra Terror, which debuted a new title sequence. It’s boggling — to me — to think that the videotape archive of Doctor Who remained complete for the entire span that the original title sequence was in use. The wiping of episodes and the commissioning of new titles are also both, I think, signs of a production team looking forwards, not back — at a time when they were also jettisoning what had once been a fundamental part of the series format, stories set in the past. It is all part of a consistent mindset.
As with the first volume, I must declare an interest in that I liaised a bit with David Brunt as he assembled this extraordinary compendium. Especially with the later bits, we scrutinised many of the same sources as I worked on my imminent biography, Written by Terrance Dicks. We discussed and debated various points where the sources aren’t entirely clear, and he read over my draft chapters and caught some of my more glaring errors.
As he explains in the introduction here, his approach has been to work chiefly from the BBC paperwork held at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham — his list of the files there that he looked through takes up two whole pages (pp. 771-2). From this, he lays out, as objectively as possible, what happened on what date. Along the way, he makes a number of shrewd deductions to tackle discrepancies in the primary sources or to plug gaps in the record.
Even so, his emphasis is on evidence from documentation. Where no documents survive, he is warier than me of using things said in later interviews by cast and crew. For example, there are several accounts that script editor / associate producer / producer Derrick Sherwin organised a screening or screenings of the Quatermass serials from the 1950s for himself and his team (Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) ahead of commissioning the first Doctor Who stories involving the new Earthbound format. In discussing that with Brunt, we think this must have taken place in late December 1968 — but, unable to be surer than that, he leaves it out of his production diary.
There are a few instances where I disagree with his conclusions — not that he’s wrong, but I interpret things another way. For example, in his entry for Tuesday 18 October 1966, he provides a summary of an early version of Part One of The Power of the Daleks, detailing how it varies from the episode as broadcast. That surviving early script is not dated, but Brunt suggests it’s the version issued to the cast for the start of rehearsals, which began on this particular Tuesday. I think the very different and much wordier version of the Doctor in this script suggests that this is the script written by David Whitaker, before — on Friday 7 October, as detailed by Brunt — Dennis Spooner was engaged to rewrite it. I think a now-lost Spooner rewrite was used in rehearsals, prior to a final (surviving) camera script being drafted.
Likewise, Brunt thinks “on or around” Tuesday 20 February 1968 that Terrance Dicks was interviewed for the job as assistant story editor on Doctor Who, and at the same attended the video playback of the most recently recorded instalment of Doctor Who, Episode 6 of The Web of Fear. My sense from Terrance’s own (brief, not entirely clear) accounts of what happened is that this playback was among the first things to happen once he’d been appointed.
This isn’t meant to quibble — it’s a delight to engage with this stuff and puzzle out the nuances as best we can. Brunt’s different perspective has made me look again at what I’ve come up with and in a couple of places I’ve been able to correct small details in my own book, just in time. What’s more, something here prompted a new line of thought and on Monday I’m off on a research trip to dig out what I hope will be new information for an article in DWM...
I look forward eagerly to the next volume.
No comments:
Post a Comment